Moneyball’ing Football
The Americans are obsessed with stats, especially when it comes to sports. So it isn’t a surprise that when they hosted the football (soccer) World Cup in 1994, they showed (what seemed to me) ridiculous stats like how much time each team had possession of the ball, or how many fouls each team committed, or how many shots at goal were on-target. Who cared, I thought? After all, what mattered was whether your side won or not. Except that today, such stats are shown in football matches all over the world. But does any of these sport stats have any practical use, I wondered? The Brad Pitt starrer about a true story, Moneyball , answered my question : “The general manager of the Oakland Athletics baseball team, Billy Beane, used statistical analysis to find undervalued players according to one or two key metrics. It worked: the Athletics went on a record-breaking 20-game winning streak in 2002.” But isn’t baseball a totally different kind of game than football? The Economist ar...